NEW YORK, U.S. - A fake news report sent the world of technology business in a tizzy after the Dow Jones newswires reported that global search engine giant, Google was acquiring Apple for $9 billion.

According to the news report, the deal was pre-arranged with Steve Jobs in his will.

The news report went viral online and was later revealed to have been caused by a ‘technical error’ which caused the portal to report several spurious stories, one of which included the headline claiming Google was acquiring Apple.

While it was very obvious that the story was made up - the story led to a temporal blip on Apple’s stock price, which briefly spiked up to $158.

However, the existence of real-time high-speed trading meant that the jump was almost certainly caused by automatic computer algorithms rather than real people.

According to the fake news report, Google employees would take over the Apple headquarters, receive 9 Apple shares for every Google stock owned and that the deal was set to close on Wednesday.

However, the stock jump was quickly corrected in the following minutes.

Dow Jones released a statement in which it said, “Please disregard the headlines that ran on Dow Jones Newswires between 9:34 a.m. ET and 9:36 a.m. ET. Due to a technical error, the headlines were published. All of those headlines are being removed from the wires. We apologize for the error.”